John Kerry on Dick Cheney: 'Please!'

Secretary of State John Kerry isn’t looking for any Iraq advice from Dick Cheney.

In an interview that aired on NBC on Thursday, Kerry dismissed the former vice president’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that criticized the Obama administration for its handling of the situation in Iraq.

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Obama: Prepared to take targeted military action in Iraq

“This is the man who took us into Iraq saying this? Please!” Kerry responded.

In an opinion piece he co-wrote with his daughter Liz Cheney, a former Senate candidate, Dick Cheney slammed “the collapsing Obama doctrine.”

“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” the Cheneys wrote about the president’s foreign policy.

In 2002, Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, voted in favor of giving former President George W. Bush the authorization to invade Iraq. Before the invasion in 2003, he criticized the Bush administration for not working with allies in NATO and the United Nations.

Kerry in the interview Thursday also clarified his comments on coordinating with Iran, saying that working “hand-in-hand” with the Iranian regime is “not on the table.”

“We are interested in communicating with Iran to make clear that the Iranians know what we’re thinking and we know what they’re thinking and that there’s a sharing of information so people aren’t making mistakes,” the top U.S. diplomat said.

Kerry said that any U.S. action in Iraq would be to benefit the Iraqi people, not Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom some have called an unreliable partner for the U.S.

“This is not about Maliki,” he said. Let me stress: What the United States is doing is about Iraq. It is not about Maliki. And nothing that the president decides to do is going to be focused specifically on Prime Minister Maliki.”

The secretary of state also called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the militant group that has swept across the northern and central parts of the country, “more extreme even than Al Qaeda.”